Jack Shafer

If our culture allowed diseased newspapers to be quarantined, I’d have the New York Post kenneled right now.

I express that sentiment after reading the Post‘s Boston Marathon bombing coverage, in which it erroneously reported that 12 were dead, mistakenly stated that a Saudi national was “a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing” and, this morning identified two Boston Marathon bystanders in a Page One photo as “Bag Men.”

Of course, every news outlet botches a breaking news story from time to time, and many have erred in their Boston reporting, as BuzzFeed, Chart Girl, Poynter, Salon and others have tabulated. But what distinguishes the New York Post from other stumbling outlets is the cavalier manner about its errors. When other outlets make monumental mistakes, they may take their time printing corrections. They may avoid acknowledging their errors if they can get away with it. Or if they acknowledge their errors promptly — as CNN’s John King did this week — they may blame “confusion” or “misinformation” rather than accept the blame directly. But by and large, the press takes its lumps.

The Post, in contrast, appears not to care whether it gets a memorable story right or wrong. It only hopes to produce a memorable story, damn the truth value.

This afternoon, Col Allan, Post editor-in-chief, demonstrated his paper’s approach to news with a statement to Salon about the controversial “Bag Men” cover story. Putting the “m” in mendacious, Allan said:

When you’re as wealthy as Rupert Murdoch ($9.4 billion) and you control a company as resource-rich as News Corp (market cap $58.1 billion), shuttering a 22-month-old business like The Daily doesn’t signify failure as much as it does surrender.

Murdoch knew what he was getting into when he launched the iPad-only (and then smartphone, Android tablet, and Kindle Fire) publication in February 2011. At a press conference, the mogul claimed to have invested $30 million pre-launch and assumed running costs of about $500,000 a week. According to a report in the New York Observer, attributed to a “source,” the operation was amassing annual losses of $30 million. But again, for someone like Murdoch, $30 million is chump change. His New York Post loses up to $70 million a year, according to some accounts, and you don’t see him closing it. Such losses are rounding errors in the company’s entertainment budget.

To place The Daily venture in scale, the last attempt to start a national, general-interest print newspaper from the ground up—USA Today—lost $600 million over the course of a decade before turning its first profit in 1994. (In today’s money, that’s more than $1 billion.) The National, the national sports daily, lost $150 million (about $250 million, corrected for inflation) in 18 months before closing in June 1991. In the late 1990s, when Murdoch was trying to crash the China satellite TV market, he had invested $2 billion and was losing $2 million a week according to his former right-hand man in that enterprise. So, please, let’s not obsess too much over Murdoch’s squandering of $30 million a year on a failed experiment. In the history of journalistic bets, this was a trivial gamble.

The Leveson inquiry completed its 17-month official investigation into the filth and the fury of the British press today, pulling into the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center opposite Westminster Abbey. There, its leader, Lord Justice (Brian) Leveson, delivered the inquiry’s 1,987-page report on the London newspaper phone-hacking scandals, wild invasions of privacy by the press and covert surveillance by newspapers, and recommended new regulations of the press.

The regime proposed by Leveson would replace the current — and toothless — self-regulation by the Press Complaints Commission with a body that would possess investigatory powers and authority to levy fines of up to £1 million for transgressors. The new body would be “voluntary,” funded by newspaper membership fees, as the 56-page executive summary explains, and “independent” of the press and government, though governed by statute. The advantage of submitting to the invitation to volunteer would be an “arbitration” service that would reduce the legal awards newspapers would have to pay when complainants brought their libel and invasion of privacy charges to the new body rather than to the courts.

Anticipating that some publications — namely the tabloids that routinely hacked phones, harassed people, co-opted the police, and published damaging lies — would refuse to volunteer, the summary recommends that those outliers be conscripted by the government’s broadcast overseer, Ofcom, which would operate as a “backstop regulator.” So there’s nothing voluntary about the regulatory scheme Lord Justice Leveson proposes. It surveys the landscape that is the British press — an institution sufficiently demented that one of its organs, News of the World, hacked dead schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s mobile phone in pursuit of lewd headlines — and proclaims that all publications, be they guilty or innocent of the numerous offenses catalogued by Leveson, be subject to a new government-mandated order. With that nose under the tent, it wouldn’t be long until the entire camel was calling the place home.

This piece originally appeared in Reuters Magazine.

Rupert Murdoch has endured more crises during his 80-plus years than Richard Nixon and Odysseus combined, so the CEO and chairman of News Corporation can be forgiven for seeming nonplussed by his current predicament. He took over the family newspaper business in Australia at 21, when his father died, and expanded it. He fought the British unions in 1986 and won. He repelled the bankers in 1990, when he was close to insolvency. He has survived two divorces, the purchase and sale of MySpace.com, a bunch of other digital disasters, and even the predations of John Malone, who threatens Murdoch family hegemony with his purchase of News Corp stock. And now, referencing his media empire’s latest fiasco, the British Parliament has deemed Murdoch “not a fit person” to run an international company.

If Murdoch were the sort of pompous captain of industry who collected leadership maxims, Look for Trouble would likely top his list. He craves competition, and has repeatedly bet his company on new ventures like 20th Century Fox, the Fox Network, NFL football and his satellite operations.

Most chief executives think rewarding stockholders is their primary job. Not Murdoch. The Murdoch family owns the controlling shares in the company, so the chairman can largely ignore Wall Street to pursue a strategy that stretches across decades, not quarters. Yes, he’s impulsive, but creatively so.

The publication today of Parliament’s 121-page report (pdf) on phone hacking has the British press all but publishing obituaries for Rupert Murdoch. The report damns him for turning “a blind eye” to the scandal of phone hacking at his companies, News Corporation and News International.

Murdoch is not “a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company,” the report concludes, leveling a hammer to the media baron’s head. As the Telegraph interprets this finding, BSkyB, the UK satellite broadcaster that Murdoch owns 39.1 percent of, is “vulnerable” to a challenge from the regulators at Ofcom. If the regulators applied their “fit and proper” test to BSkyB, they could cancel its broadcasting license, order News Corp. to reduce its holdings in the broadcaster and oust Rupert’s son James Murdoch from its board of directors. The BBC seconded the Telegraph‘s take, and the Telegraph and the Guardian speculate that the report will echo in the United States, triggering criminal prosecutions and unending damage to Murdoch’s corporate reputation here.

Murdoch’s corporate counterattack today states that News Corp. has “already confronted and … acted on the failings documented in the Report,” insisting that the company has righted all the wrongs. In a memo to his 50,000 employees, Murdoch remained defiant, minimizing corporate wrongdoing and maximizing the corrective measures his company has taken.

Pummel Rupert Murdoch and his minions all you want for News Corp.’s phone-hacking of celebrities and crime victims, its computer-hacking, its blagging, its bribing of police, its payments of hush money, its obstruction of justice, and its operation of what former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown once called a “criminal-media nexus.”

But spare me the feigned outrage excited by this week’s interrogations of Murdoch and his son James Murdoch by the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics and practices. The Guardian, the Telegraph and the New York Times, among others, appear to be appalled by news that the media baron lobbied the UK government aggressively so that he could expand his holdings in the tightly regulated satellite broadcaster BSkyB from 39.1 percent to 100 percent. The Times cites subpoenaed News Corp. emails released by Leveson to show a Murdoch lobbyist working “hand-in-glove” with the office of a government regulator.

Isn’t climbing into the skins of regulators the very definition of lobbying? That’s how I understand it. Hate Murdoch all you want, but if you’re invested in highly regulated businesses like BSkyB and you need government approval to invest deeper in the regulated business, then working “hand-in-glove” with the regulators is exactly what the situation calls for. Should the Murdochs have ignored the regulators as they attempted to increase their holdings in BSkyB? Of course not.

New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters invests 2,400 words today in a Page One story delineating the “rift” between News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and his son and heir apparent, News Corp. Chief Operating Officer James Murdoch.

If News Corp. were a normal company and Rupert Murdoch a normal father, readers might glean from this report that a real power struggle is going on for the future of the company. But News Corp. is not your normal company, Rupert is not your normal dad, and there really is no struggle going on for the future of the company, only a replay of the previous “rifts” that have opened between Rupert Murdoch and his two other children by his second wife Anna—Elisabeth and Lachlan. You see, Rupert sets his adult children up to smack them down.

The first of Rupert’s heirs apparent to suffer the public humiliation of a rift was Elisabeth. In 2000, when she was 31, she escaped the family business. A Guardian story from 2000 about her departure says she was “once tipped as a business successor to her father.” What rattled her was her father’s designation of Lachlan as the new heir apparent. The Guardian continues:

Wall Street Journal Europe Publisher Andrew Langhoff resigned yesterday, but why?

A hard-to-comprehend story in today’s Wall Street Journal alleges that Langhoff transgressed by pressuring Wall Street Journal Europe reporters into covering an advertiser, consulting firm ELP, and by contractually promising that WSJE reporters would cover ELP in “special report” sections. (The tainted stories in question now carry a disclaimer.)

There’s a third dimension to the scandal, which the Wall Street Journal article soft-pedals. It turns out that bulk-sold, discounted copies of WSJE were sold to the same advertiser, ELP, to boost circulation. I defy any reader to cull the salient passages and find any evidence or hint of circulatory wrong-doing by the publication.

By Jack Shafer
The views expressed are his own.

London’s Metropolitan Police, who helped cover up the U.K.’s phone-hacking scandal for the better part of a decade, have finally figured out how to crack the case. Attack the press.

The Guardian, which kept the story alive after Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World minions, top politicians, and the cops throttled it, reports that the Metropolitan Police have requested a court order to force two of its reporters, Amelia Hill and Nick Davies, to surrender their confidential sources from their July 4 Milly Dowler phone-hacking story. Hill has already been questioned by police.

The Met is making its demand under the  Official Secrets Act, which is usually invoked in national security cases. In 1985, Ministry of Defence employee Clive Ponting was prosecuted under the act for divulging information about the sinking of an Argentinean ship during the Falklands War. In 2002, counter-intelligence officer David Shayler was convicted of giving secret documents to a newspaper. In 2003, U.K. government employee Katharine Gun was charged under the act with leaking to a reporter email from the National Security Agency requesting help in bugging the United Nations offices of six countries.